With an improperly sworn-in jury sitting, Forster opened the Crown’s case against Brian. He handed out documents to the jury and told
them that they could keep the documents. These documents formed what is
commonly known as the ‘Trial Bundle’. A defendant must also be provided with a
copy of the very same bundle as provided to each juror (for obvious reasons),
but Brian was not provided with the trial bundle. At the Harry Redknapp trial also at Southwark Crown Court in January and February 2012, both Harry
Redknapp and Milan Mandaric were provided with a copy each as they sat in
the dock watching the trial against them unfold.
In the John Terry trial at the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court – which Brian also attended – Mr Terry was
also provided with a copy of the trial bundle and he was seen occasionally leafing through
it as his trial unfolded. Yet Brian Pead was not given a copy. His defence
counsel did not ensure that he had a copy. This means that Brian has no
knowledge whatsoever of what each juror was shown in the trial bundle – the
police and CPS could have
put any documents in the
bundle.
Forster then told the jury about the importance of
Joinder. He claimed that the Crown was forced to join
two separate indictments against Brian in the “interest of justice”.
What Forster failed to tell the jury is that the rules of
Joinder do not
allow for different indictments to be joined unless certain criteria apply.
Archbold deals with
Joinder at section 1-154:
“…Rule 14.2(3) of
the Criminal Procedure Rules 2005 […] provides that an indictment may
contain more than one count if all
the offences charged
(a) are founded on
the same facts, or
(b) form or are
part of a series of offences of the same or a similar character…”
Although both cases against Brian were of a sexual nature, they were
not capable of being joined because their execution was significantly
different. Exposing one’s self to a group of three students is an entirely
different act from going online and inciting a child to engage in sexual
acts. Indeed, the ages of the alleged
victims were different – the students were in the 20-22 age-range and the
alleged ‘girl’ was 14.
Thus these two separate Indictments should never have been heard in
the same Court by the same jury. But the issue of mis-Joinder was a much larger issue because, as we have
seen in an earlier chapter, in February 2009, the CPS – with the same Timothy Forster representing them – applied for Joinder at
Woolwich Crown Court before Judge Charles Byers. Quite rightly, Byers refused to join the two cases, stating that
the two allegations did not contain a ‘common nexus’.
The CPS, however, would not relent. They ensured that
the Exposure case collapsed at Woolwich Crown Court, and that it was transferred
to Southwark Crown Court, a court with a higher record
of convictions when compared with other Crown Courts in London.
In a case of mis-Joinder, any conviction is
automatically overturned:
“In R. v Newland
[1988], it was held that misjoinder
of offences in contravention of rule 9 of the Indictment Rules 1971 cannot be
cured by a direction for separate trials of the misjoined counts. If a court
proceeds to try a misjoined indictment the proceedings will be a nullity and
any resulting convictions […] will be quashed…”
Yet here was Forster telling the jury that the first case is for
Exposure and the second for Incitement. The trial, because of mis-Joined
indictments, is already void ab initio
(from the beginning).
Legally, Exposure means exposing one’s genitals to another to cause
them “alarm or distress”. Forster told the jury that Brian Pead lived opposite
three female students in Days Lane, Sidcup in Kent. But he didn’t. He lived
opposite a church. The three female
drama students were actually four
females who lived at 62 Days Lane. This house was rented out to the females,
who were attending Rose Bruford drama college in Burnt Oak Lane in Sidcup which was about a twenty-minute walk
from Days Lane.
The house at 62 Days Lane – where the four students lived – was almost
100 feet (33 metres) away and at an angle of approximately 22.5 degrees from
the perpendicular. In other words, this would mean that it would be extremely
difficult to look out of Brian’s bedroom window and into the house at 62. Or
the other way round.
Just prior to the students moving into number 62 in September 2007,
Brian Pead had had the entire front of his house clad in scaffolding. He had
decided to embark upon a huge refurbishment of his tired-looking 1930s-built
semi-detached house which meant knocking down some internal walls, pulling down
all the ceilings and taking up all the floors. During this process he also
installed an entirely new central heating system and re-wired the entire house.
Much of this work he achieved on his own. On other occasions he sought extra
help from David Cox, a firefighter friend with significant
building skills and Geoffrey Bacon, a self-employed plumber and
builder friend. Certain work took extra pairs of hands or some skills that
Brian did not have or, if he had the skill, he sometimes preferred to buy in
extra labour to ensure that he was undertaking the refurbishment properly.
Soon after the females moved in, he noticed one night that the female
in the front room would often undress for bed in front of open curtains or,
more accurately, in front of one open curtain. She would shut the curtains
which were directly opposite Nell Stanley’s house at 85 Days Lane, yet
keep the curtains open which allowed slight visual access into Brian’s house.
Brian is a man who notices such oddities. Yet what was particularly
odd was that the female would almost dance as she stripped, as if she were
working as a stripper in some Soho club. She would run her fingers through her
hair and over her breasts and it appeared to Brian when he noticed this that
she was, perhaps, dancing to some music in her room. After three occasions, he
wrote what he regarded as a humorous note complimenting her on her dancing and
informing her that she could be seen. For many years as a teacher, he had
employed the use of humour when chastising pupils, believing this to be more
effective in the longer-term than a straightforward admonishment. The
inference, of course, was that she should close her curtains. He put the note
through her door one evening in October 2007. The humorous, yet informative,
note was intended by Brian to simply draw the female’s attention to the fact
that she could be seen (if she were not aware of this fact). Initially he
thought that she might be dancing seductively in order to draw attention to
herself from the three young men (all aged around 20-24) who lived directly
next door to Brian at 87 Days Lane. This house was owned by Glen Meeking, a van driver, and his wife, Jenny, a
teacher. Brian hypothesised that the female might be dancing in order to
attract the attention of one or another of the young men.
It occurred to Brian that a young woman – she looked to him to be
around 23 – who received such a note would then start to ensure that she closed
her curtains when she undressed for bed. Yet the note had the opposite effect.
She continued to dance on a more regular basis – something around one or two
occasions a week – and she maintained this for almost nine months.
This was not something that drew Brian’s attention much after the
first two or three occasions. As a counsellor, he hypothesised that she must
have some personality disorder that was driving her to display herself so
often, perhaps some form of narcissistic disorder. Perhaps she had a lack of
parental love or she needed the attention of men through displaying her body
rather than seek love from a man for who she was and not for what she looked
like. Several hypotheses floated through his mind and he carried out some
initial research into Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Forster played to the gallery: “This note caused
Elizabeth McIntyre great distress. She was very upset by the
thought that she could be seen by others living across the road. And especially
by a much older man.”
This was clearly a ridiculous line of reasoning from Forster. Had she really been so
upset, she would have closed her curtains and that would have been the end of
the matter. She didn’t do that. Instead, McIntyre kept the note, allegedly failed
to mention it to anyone and continued to dance and display her body for the next eight months. Hardly the actions
of a young woman who was distressed at the thought that others might see her.
Brian asked Ellen “Nellie” Stanley, an elderly
neighbour in her seventies who lived directly opposite the females’ rented
house, if she had seen anything odd about the house. She said that she had seen
several strange things, not least that the girl whose bedroom was at the front
of the house – Elizabeth McIntyre – would close her right hand-hand window
curtains at night but not the left-hand curtains. Nellie Stanley also told Brian that she had seen a
handgun being waved about in the front bedroom. She hadn’t been sure whether it
was a real gun or merely a prop. Given that they were drama students, it was
perhaps more likely to have been a prop. On the other hand, ‘drug-dealer types’
had been seen at the house, especially attending the late-night parties.
Brian then went to see Glen Meeking, a man of around fifty who drove a
delivery van for Palmer and Harvey. Meeking was a football fan
and a Sunday League referee and he and Brian shared this common interest. Meeking
told Brian that the girls had lots of late night parties which sometimes didn’t
finish until four or five in the morning.
The following is a copy of Glen Meeking’s statement:
“…7 June 2008
To Whom It May Concern,
My name is Glen Meeking
and I live with my family at 87 Days Lane.
I have lived there for approximately 5 years.
From around September 2007, I noticed that
some students had moved into the house opposite my house, 62 Days Lane.
I had often seen lots of people in and out
of that house. I don’t know if it was a
brothel or drug or vice den, but there were often late night parties till about
3 or 4am.
With regard to Brian Pead, my neighbour at
89 Days Lane, we have never fallen out or had a cross word. I would describe him as a friend and a good
neighbour. I’ve got to know quite a bit
about him from the chats we’ve had over the fence, or when he’s been doing up
his house.
I am prepared to go to court and say that in
all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen anything out of the ordinary at
his house or with him. I have never seen
any schoolgirls at his house, or anyone under aged…”
On 4
November 2008, Ellen Stanley made the following statement:
“…To
Whom It May Concern
My
name is Mrs Ellen Stanley and I
live at 85 Days Lane, Sidcup. I have lived here since 1994, making it just over
14 years.
In September 2007 a group of female students
moved into 62 Days Lane, which is directly opposite my house.
I noticed a lot of comings and goings and
there were lots of different men going in and out of the house.
There were also a lot of loud parties and
noise late into the night, often until 3 or 4am.
For several months I noticed something
really strange with the curtains in the upstairs bedroom which overlooks my
house, directly opposite.
The curtains were nearly always left open on
the left-hand window (as you look at it from my house) even though the curtains
at the right-hand window were drawn.
The arrangement of the curtains seemed
strange to me and I wondered why anyone would choose to draw the curtains on
one window but not the other window which was obviously in the same room.
This strange pattern with the curtains
carried on from about September 2007 through to May or June 2008.
The new lodger in that room always draws
both sets of curtains.
I have known Brian for 14 years and believe
him to be of good character…”
These two character references from neighbours who had known him for
several years were obviously helpful to Brian. How strange, therefore, that the
police did not interview either Ellen Stanley or Glen Meeking. How strange, too, that neither Angela
Shaw nor Dominic Bell contacted either of the neighbours who had spoken highly
of Brian.
Then Brian went to speak with Nicholas Kerr, the vicar of the Holy
Redeemer Church in Days Lane, directly opposite his house. The
vicar confirmed that “there had been several complaints about the tenants’
behaviour”.
It is not beyond the realms of possibility that the females at 62 Days
Lane were committing some form of criminal offence, whether it were
prostitution, using or dealing drugs or even merely creating too much noise in
the neighbourhood.
It is likely that, if they were committing criminal offences, then a
‘deal’ could be worked out whereby they would accuse Brian of masturbating at
his bedroom window and charges against them would be dropped.
These were clearly not the sweet and innocent victims that Forster was attempting to portray to the Jury.
“These girls,” (notice his use of the word ‘girls’) Forster continued, “were frightened by the defendant.
He was watching them at least twice a week and on 5 May 2008 he was seen at his
bedroom window in the dark with his right hand down his trousers playing with
himself.”
Forster was misleading the Jury. It was not ‘girls’
plural who had complained, it was ‘girl’ singular – Elizabeth McIntyre, the exhibitionist, who had
allegedly called the police to say that she had seen Brian at his bedroom
window masturbating over a period of some nine months before she complained.
On the night of 7 May 2008, Brian had a bad attack of gout. He had never suffered from
this condition before and thought that he broken his toe but couldn’t
understand how it had occurred. He went to bed early that night in an attempt
to sleep off the pain. He was certainly not in a condition to stand at a window
masturbating.
Forster mentioned that the females had claimed Brian
had been seen in the dark. In front of the alleged window was a scaffold ladder
and three scaffold poles blocking the view into and out of that window.
The windowsills in Brian’s house were somewhat high. In the bedroom in
question, there was a particularly low ceiling. Brian Pead is a little over six
feet tall. He could not have stood on a chair to expose himself. His genitals
would have been below the height of the window sill had he stood at the window.
The females’ house was some 100 feet away. In the dark, McIntyre claimed that
she could see the Defendant’s eye colour: brown. His eyes are blue. She claimed
she could see his hair colour: brown. He is mostly grey-haired. She claimed
that she would often see him masturbating with his right hand. Over a period of
nine months.
Yet Brian Pead is – and always has been - left-handed.
Then Forster further misled the jury when he stated that “...the
Faceparty website is now defunct...”
It was not, in fact, defunct, at all. It had been liquidated in May
2008 and immediately started up again under a different company name but with
the same domain name of <www.faceparty.com>.
The director was the same. Forster thus committed perjury. He also perverted the
course of justice because he knew that the website was not defunct.
It had been liquidated and then had risen, like a phoenix from the
ashes. In the process of liquidation, however, evidence had been
‘lost’ and a considerable amount of money (some reports suggest a figure in the
region of £25m) had also been siphoned out of the company.
Brian Pead had been carefully monitoring this website. He was not the
only person in the country monitoring this website from a distance, but this
book will focus only on his story.
From around September 2007 he had noticed a considerable moral decline
on the website. He had joined it in around 2004 and had engaged in a number of
intelligent – and not so intelligent – conversations. He had shared music files
with people (before it was outlawed) and he had been sent books by people and
had himself sent books to others. He had met several people from the website in
the real world, but no under-age people. He had met people aged between 18 and
60, been abroad with some and generally made some good friends from the site.
He had never seen it merely as a ‘virtual’ meeting place, but as a tool to meet
a wide variety of people in the ‘real world’.
Consider what Forster had already achieved. He had sown a seed of
doubt in the jury’s mind that Pead had exposed himself to three ‘innocent
girls’ in a house across the road and that he waged a campaign of sexual
harassment against them for a period of nine months.
He had also sowed a seed that Pead had been interacting on the
internet with ‘more young women’. Forster’s prosecuting act was based
on falsehoods and he knew it.
The Crown’s proposition was that Brian Pead had engaged in three
conversations with an underage girl of 14 and that he had incited her to engage
in sexual relations contrary to section 10 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
The charge in itself is interesting and was examined in chapter 29. Even
a cursory glance at the precise wording of the legislation shows that – for the
crime of incitement to have been committed, and therefore for someone to be
guilty of the crime – that there has to have been another person involved. Clearly it is not possible to incite a
machine or thin air.
The prosecution claimed that Brian had incited a police officer who
had been posing as a 14-year-old girl.
Had that been true, then it follows that Brian had incited a police officer
(and, therefore, not a 14-year-old girl). Had this been true, then the police
officer is clearly not underage and it follows that Brian cannot, therefore, be
guilty of inciting an underage girl.
There clearly was never a case against him. But what the Crown
Prosecution Service did (acting on instructions from on
high) was to change the indictment to one of attempting to incite. In any event, Brian could not be guilty of
this crime either because there still has to have been a real person who is
under aged. Yet it was a ploy created simply to deceive the jury.
During Brian’s investigation into what he believed – and later knew to
be – illegal activities on Faceparty involving prostitution, child prostitution and
child pornography, he had come upon a person entering a chat room claiming to
be a 14-year-old girl who wanted money ‘desperately’ in exchange for sex.
At this time (January 2008), Brian was undertaking an Advanced Diploma
in Humanistic Integrative Counselling. Much of the content of this course was
of a psychosexual matter. He was counselling clients with significant sexual
issues. He had been sexually abused between the ages of 5 and 11 which started
in a children’s home in Harpenden,
Hertfordshire.
He therefore knew more about the subject of child sexual abuse than
the ‘average person in the street’. He had been deeply traumatised when it
first occurred and had thereafter developed a lifelong interest in the subject
from a psychological and counselling perspective.
He instinctively knew, therefore, that this person claiming to be a
14-year-old girl in the chatroom was not, in fact, a child at all. He knew it
was an adult and it was his belief that it was a middle-aged male, or certainly
someone with a deep interest in the subject of paedophilia.
He was, of course, right.
Several members of the chatroom – all adults – responded to this
‘girl’ by telling ‘her’ that if she really was only 14, then (a) how did she
get access to the adult social website and (b) that ‘she’ should leave the room
and forget about earning money that way.
Upon leaving the room (at least under that profile name), ‘she’ left
her MSN messenger email address and asked people to
add her.
Several people did this. Undoubtedly some would have added this email
address in order to solicit sexual services. Brian added this email address,
however, for entirely different reasons. He knew this was a completely odd
situation and he wanted to learn more. He also believed that the person on the
other end of the profile might be a paedophile, since his counselling training
had taught him that a common modus
operando of a sex offender is that they pose as teenagers in order to attract
children to them. He thus added this person’s email address in order to ‘smoke
out’ whoever it was pretending to be a teenager.
This was not the first time he had operated in this way. As a
counsellor, he often worked in such a way whereby he would create a hypothesis
about a client, listen patiently to whatever the client presented and observe
over a long period of time to see if the client’s behaviour patterns and
‘story’ matched their original presenting issue. Often with the use of a
judicious question or two, he would ‘smoke out’ the personality issue that the
client was attempting to mask.
Unlike many counsellors who often try to interpret whatever a client
tells them, Brian rarely operated in this way. His clients would often tell him
that his greatest quality was that of being a listener without offering
interpretations. This requires a specific frame of mind. It involves pushing
one’s ego into the background – the willingness that we all have as human
beings to interpret what others are telling us in relation to our own frame of
reference.
Brian does not do that. He listens and stores that information without
attempting to interpret. Interpretation, he believes, can come later in the
work if it is necessary. He seeks to understand and to help clients understand
their lives.
He views the counselling process as one entirely made up of ‘smoking
out’ the truth in a person’s life, such as human beings can ever be sure of
what is truth in their lives.
Brian Pead had been brought up by a father who often would say to him,
“Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.” Being told that at the age
of 10 did little for the young Brian’s education at that point, but, as he grew
older, his father’s words began to gain credence in his life and he began to see
the wisdom in the words.
At the age of 15, his brother Robert ran away from home and stayed
away. He re-located to Lowestoft,
then a thriving fishing town on the east coast of Suffolk. He commenced work as
a deck-hand on board a trawler. Lowestoft trawlers at that time would often
work the east coast of England and Scotland, move to the west coast of Scotland
and sometimes even work off the coast of Iceland (until the famous ‘Cod Wars’.)
The general rule of thumb was that the boats – which were only around
90 feet in length – would be away for 12 days and in harbour at Lowestoft for two days (when wages were often spent in
public houses on alcohol and prostitutes.)
Robert had worked his way from being a deckhand to a Third Hand. He
was on his way to becoming a Mate (assistant skipper) and then finally a
skipper with his own boat. At this period in history, being a skipper of a
Lowestoft trawler meant a considerable income and
several skippers owned significant properties on the coast in areas like Corton
and Gorleston on the east coast.
Robert had gained employment with Boston Deep Sea Fisheries, and he signed on to the St. Kitts trawler.
The St. Kitts was built in 1941 by Cochrane and Sons of Selby, Yorkshire. It was 142½ feet long. It was a steel side trawler and ran on oil, requiring between 14 and 16 men to operate it. The vessel had an interesting life and had several names. Starting out with the name of Le Royal (GY400) it was operated in December 1941 by Grimsby Motor Trawlers, of Grimsby. On 30 December 1944 it was transferred to Milford Steam Trawlers, of Milford, managed by James Carpenter Ward and was re-named the Milford Marquis (M14).
Above: the St. Kitts trawler
The St. Kitts was the first motor trawler designed for
Arctic fishing. On 1 October 1940 it was
converted to a minesweeper (P.No.FY.1750). After the war, it was returned to
its owners in July 1946. It landed fish at Milford between 2 July 1946 and 10
June 1951. The trawler was skippered by
Albert Saunders in 1946, Benny Riches in 1947, Jimmy Jobson in 1949 and Harry
Rich in 1950.
It transferred to Dutch owners, Ymuiden, and in 1964 it was purchased
by Claridge Trawlers of Lowestoft,
managed by Gordon David Claridge and it was renamed the St. Kitts (LT481).
The boat was finally broken up on the River Humber in November 1976.
However, as we have seen, on Tuesday, April 11, 1972, Robert Pead suffered
catastrophic head injuries on board the St.
Kitts trawler working off the east coast of Scotland. The knocking-out bar, which weighs around a
hundredweight, had fractured his skull.
Despite being air-lifted off the trawler and taken to Aberdeen Royal
Infirmary, Robert died in September 1972. Despite giving up his job in
Surbiton, and despite enrolling as a deckhand on board a trawler with Boston
Deep Sea Fisheries in Lowestoft, Brian Pead never found out what really
happened to his brother. However, seeds
had been sown in his mind about investigative journalism, undercover work and seeking
justice.
With this kind of mind and determination to seek justice, Brian first engaged
in conversation with the ‘girl’ on 28 January 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment